The Truth about Ape Canyon
The Ape Canyon story is more than just miners being attacked by Mountain Devils, it’s everything that happened 100 years later. How the the world drew these people of so many backgrounds, myself included, into it’s inexplicable web.
Ape Canyon… if you know, you know. If you don’t, go watch my latest documentary, The Siege of Ape Canyon. It’ll learn you a thing or two about the gold miners on the Eastern slopes of Mt. St. Helens who ran across the Mountain Devils. There’s violence, horror, guns! It’s a wild story, one that remains, ever frustratingly so, unresolved. I knew that when I was going to tell this story, resolving this century long mystery was not going to be my focus.
I began my tenure at Small Town Monsters in 2021, at the age of 22. I started on the shoot for On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Discovery, covering the Olympic Project and the Nest Sites they had discovered. This is where I met everyone for the first time, Seth Breedlove, Chris Spencer, Derek Randles, Shane Corson and Marc Myrsell.
When I met Marc, we were at the Olympic Project Cabin in the northern reaches of the Olympic Peninsula. Seth was doing round after round of interview and I was chugging a bottle of DayQuil, trying to nurse myself back to health after getting sick the first day of that trip. Of course, Marc at that point was already famous for being the man who had discovered the Ape Canyon cabin, known colloquially as “the Ape Canyon guy”. Everyone was swarming around him like bees. I wanted to talk to him but didn’t know what to say, but then something occurred to me.
At that point in my life I was trying to get access to Ivan Sanderson’s collection of research, for the purpose of digitizing it and making sure it didn’t get lost to history. I couldn’t remember what lead me down that path, but I knew that this weirdly unique piece of knowledge was my ticket to a smooth sailing conversation with the Marc Myrsell.
I found Marc at one point during the day sitting by himself and I went up to him and asked point blank “Do you know whoMichael Swords is?” I had heard through the grapevine that Michael Swords was the owner of Ivan Sanderson’s collection and had it resting in his basement somewhere in Michigan. His face was a mixture of bewilderment and cool knowing. “Sure” he said, and we began to talk. My gamble had payed off, Marc was just as much of a nerd in extremely niche history as I was. We never did get our hands on that collection though.
After that day, just about every year, I would find myself back out to Marc Myrsell’s place in Washington, playing guitar until 5 or 6 AM, singing Hank Williams, Woodie Guthrie and the like. Playing not to impress anybody, but playing just to play, loving the music and the history behind the songs.
Marc is easily one of my favorite people in the world. He is an intensely unique human and storyteller. He tells these incredibly long winded stories that have so much context, that sometimes you get lost in it, before he brings it back to the story he was initially telling. And the stories are so varied in subject matter that it’s sometimes hard to keep up. He’ll go on about the early 20th century logging industry as if he’s lived it, switch gears on you and start talking about whales and how to clean their skeletons, then bring it all back home to Sasquatch. He is also so wonderfully rustic. Everything from the house he lives in to the aquarium he owns and manages with his family, it all has deeply historic roots. Going back generation after generation. The more I hung out with Marc, the more I was drawn into his world meeting his wife Kathryn, his sons, and his best friend Brad Angus, the machinist.
I could write a whole book on my time with Brad. As hard as it is to believe, Brad is just as intensely unique as Marc, if not more so. The first time I met Brad, I was at Marc’s house for the first time, looking at a footprint cast with Cliff Barackman. He’s lanky and small in almost equal contrast to how broad and tall Marc is. For all of Marc’s eloquence, Brad has his own peculiar brand of cadence while speaking. It’s rough and unabashedly circular. He wears overalls and smokes a pipe. I’ll never forget when Brad and I walked from his house, across the bridge over the Columbia river, almost into Portland (Portlandia as Brad calls it) to get my first real pipe. I still smoke that dark wooden pipe and I think about that day every time I do. As gruff and textured as Brad is, he’s a very genuine and caring person, and it wasn’t long before I was drawn into Brad’s world too, meeting his children, his wife, his cats, his chickens, seeing his work station where he meticulously handcrafts bagpipes.
It is no mystery that Brad and Marc are the best of friends, they both march to the beat of their own drum, but different parts of the same drum. It’s not the drum that everyone else marches to, the one that hums and whirrs and beeps like all of our electronic devices, but it’s one that’s in the back of everyone’s mind. One older and more ancient. It’s the drum of people who worked by hand, who were fearless. It was the same drum that Grizzly Adams or Daniel Boone marched to. The very same that great explorers like Lewis and Clark or John Muir followed. It’s the one that’s been drowned out by all today’s digital static.
I can’t remember the exact moment, it might have been smoking a pipe on top of the West Port Aquarium watching the sun set over the Pacific or watching Marc cook his infamous Dynamite Chili that I would soon discover would blow up my intestines… and his toilet, or maybe it was when Brad told me there were ghosts in Marc’s basement and I was too afraid to go to asleep, or perhaps it was during a long conversation that lasted into the wee hours of the morning and Marc was so sleep deprived that as he was closing a window it came crashing down and cut his hand open. It was somewhere in that whirl of experiences that I knew I had to capture that feeling. Marc Myrsell’s life was really, in all honestly, the reason I made my series Bigfoot: The Road to Discovery. I wanted to capture that feeling I had every time I found myself in the grand Pacific Northwest. That feeling of texture, of flavor, of the sights and sounds so wonderfully different than my home. It’s ironic that Marc was not included in that series very much, but even still, I had a vision for what I wanted to do.
I wanted to create the series and follow the lives of the Olympic Project members, create a special focused on Cliff Barackman and his museum, the North American Bigfoot Center, and then top it all off with the grand finale, Ape Canyon. I don’t think I’ve ever expressed that publicly before, but I can say that I successfully accomplished that goal. Credit where credit is due though, none of it would have been possible without Seth Breedlove and his company Small Town Monsters. Seth paved the way for me to travel and have these experiences. First by forming Small Town Monsters and then by, on some miraculous whim inviting me to help film Discovery with him. He also made it possible for me to tell the Ape Canyon story.
Seth has often said that the Ape Canyon story was one that he wanted to tell from the early days of STM. I remember the phone call where he told me that he was giving that story to me. I was shocked and honestly didn’t expect that. I know as a storyteller myself, you can get very territorial about what stories you want to tell. Nearly every storyteller worth their salt, and those that aren’t, are this way. I know it probably hurt like hell for Seth to give me the keys to Ape Canyon, but I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to tell this story, especially in the way I saw it.
The Ape Canyon story is of course the big draw of the film. People always want “the Bigfoot evidence”. They want the scary stories that make them crap their pants and make them afraid to step into the woods. Honestly, that stuff doesn’t interest me. Walking around at night, banging on trees hoping to get a reaction isn’t my prerogative. Any hardcore “squatchers” out there might have just put me on their blacklist for saying that, but that’s the truth. Sure it’s fun, but what matters to me is who Marc is, who Brad is, who Kathryn is, who the Mitchells are. These things, these unquantifiable factors, these peeks at a whole world that so different from the daily commute and the meetings that could have been emails, are what matter. The Ape Canyon story is more than just miners being attacked by Mountain Devils, it’s everything that happened 100 years later. How the world drew these people of so many backgrounds, myself included, into it’s inexplicable web. I may have been the one to make the documentary, but I wasn’t the one who told the story. I didn’t weave the fabric of life in such a way that a land surveyor and bagpipe crafter would be drawn into this tale. Or the happenstance meeting of John Pickering at a Sasquatch conference and telling his piece of the story, which was a chance encounter with Fred Beck’s family member. It’s chance encounter upon chance encounter. People’s lives being entangled together forming together, piece by piece, this grander story than that of 1924. It’s true that these people chose to look into the Sasquatch phenomenon, but did they have any idea of how far it would go? I think back to my conversation with Seth that fateful day in September 2020. There was no way I could know then, that I would be here now writing this.
All that I experienced in my years of knowing Marc and Brad coagulated into what the Siege of Ape Canyon is. You could think of it like a big, juicy slab of Rib Eye Steak, that’s the story of the miners. The flames from the grill, searing in those perfect grill marks, that’s Fred Beck’s “I Fought the Ape-Men of Mt. St. Helens”. The salt, that’s Marc Myrsell, that brings out the flavor and makes the whole thing a deliciously savory meal.
That’s what I set out to accomplish with Ape Canyon. It’s difficult to capture it all on camera, because it’s intangible, but I hope, when you watch the film, a little bit of that feeling makes it’s way from the TV screen into your homes. I hope it makes you pause and consider that, even if all the blank spaces on the map are filled up, there’s plenty of pieces missing in the historical record and it’s all out there waiting to be found, not only in libraries and people’s basements, but also out in the world, waiting for someone to go out and find it again.
The Siege of Ape Canyon is now available on VOD on YouTube TV, Apple TV and Google Play. See a clip from the film below.
Road to Discovery Finale
Today it’s all over!
Today, Bigfoot: The Road to Discovery ends. As I talk about in the episode, this series is very near and dear to my heart and I’m sad that it is ending, but also, I acknowledge that it cannot be superficially extended. To do so would only weaken the series as a whole.
I want to thank the members of the Olympic Project: Shane Corson, Todd Hale, Chris Spencer and Rebekah Slick for being my friends and helping me through some of the stuff I was dealing with at the time of making the series. They really pulled me out of being in a dark place.
When I first met the Olympic Project in 2021, never did I in a million years think that I was going to be so close to them or that I would make such an in depth series about them. I know young Eli is geeking about the things that older Eli has done, and I’m very thankful to have done this series.
Thanks again to everyone involved in the making of this series, it was truly a once in a lifetime experience and can’t wait to see everyone again further on down the road to discovery.
The Road’s End is now on YouTube!